Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Crawl solutions for landing pages that don't contain a robots.txt file?
-
My site (www.nomader.com) is currently built on Instapage, which does not offer the ability to add a robots.txt file. I plan to migrate to a Shopify site in the coming months, but for now the Instapage site is my primary website. In the interim, would you suggest that I manually request a Google crawl through the search console tool? If so, how often? Any other suggestions for countering this Meta Noindex issue?
-
No problem Tom. Thanks for the additional info — that is helpful to know.
-
Bryan,
I’m glad that you found what you where looking for.
I must have missed the part about it being 100% Instapage when you said CMS I thought meant something on else with instapage I think of it as landing pages not a CMS
I want to help so you asked about Google search console how often you need to request google index your site.
First make sure
You should have 5 urls in Google search console
your domain, http://www. , http:// , https://www. & https://
- nomader.com
- https://www.nomader.com
- https://nomader.com
- http;//www.nomader.com
- http://nomader.com
you should not have to requests google index once you’re pages are in googles index. There is no time line to make you need to requests google index.
Use search consoles index system to see if you need to make a request and look for notifications
Times you should request google crawl when adding new unlinked pages , when making big changes to your site , whatever adding pages with out a xml sitemap or fixing problems / testing.
I want to help so as you said you’re going to be using Shopify.
Just before you go live running on Shopify in the future you should make a xml sitemap of the Instapage site
You can do it for free using https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/
you’re running now name it /sitemap_ip.xml or /sitemap2.xml upload it to Shopify
& make sure it’s not the same name so it will work with your Shopify xml sitemap /sitemap.xml
submit the /sitemap._ip.xml to search console then add the Shopify /sitemap.xml
You can run multiple xml sitemaps as long as they are not overlapping
just remember never add non-200 page, 404s, 300sno flow , no index or redirects to a xml sitemap ScreamingFrog will ask if you want to when you’re making the sitemap.
Shopify will make its own xml sitemaps and and having the current site as a second xml sitemap will help to make sure your change to the site will not hurt the intipage par of the Shopify site
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/34592?hl=en
know adding a XML Sitemap is a smart move
I hope that was of help I’m so about miss what you meant.
respectfully,
Tom
-
Thanks so much for your thoughtful, detailed response. That answers my question.
-
Bryan,
If I understand your intent, you want your pages indexed. I see that your site has 5 pages indexed (/, /help, /influencers, /wholesale, /co-brand). And that you have some other pages (e.g. /donations), which are not indexed, but these have "noindex" tags explicitly in their HEAD sections.
Not having a robots.txt file is equal to having a robots.txt file with a directive to allow crawling of all pages. This is per http://www.robotstxt.org/orig.html, where they say "The presence of an empty "/robots.txt" file has no explicit associated semantics, it will be treated as if it was not present, i.e. all robots will consider themselves welcome."
So, if you have no robots.txt file, the search engine will feel free to crawl everything it discovers, and then whether or not it indexes those pages will be guided by presence or absence of NOINDEX tags in your HEAD sections. From a quick browse of your site and its indexed pages, this seems to be working properly.
Note that I'm referencing a distinction between "crawling" and "indexing". The robots.txt file provides directives for crawling (i.e. access discovered pages, and discovering pages linked to those). Whereas the meta robots tags in the head provide directives for indexing (i.e. including the discovered pages in search index and displaying those as results to searchers). And in this context, absence of a robots.txt file simply allows the search engine to crawl all of your content, discover all linked pages, and then rely on meta robots directives in those pages for any guidance on whether or not to index those pages it finds.
As for a sitemap, while they are helpful for monitoring indexation, and also provide help to search engines to discover all desired pages, in your case it doesn't look especially necessary. Again, I only took a quick look, but it seems you have your key pages all linked from your home page, and you have meta directives in pages you wish to keep out of the index. And you have a very small number of pages. So, it looks like you are meeting your crawl and indexation desires.
-
Hi Tom,
Unfortunately, Instapage is a proprietary CMS that does not currently support robots.txt or site maps. Instapage is primarily built for landing pages, and not actual websites so that's their reasoning for not adding SEO support for basics like robots.txt and site maps.
Thanks anyway for your help.
Best,
-Bryan
-
hi
so I see the problem now
https://www.nomader.com/robots.txt
Does not have a robots.txt file upload it to the root of your server or specific place where Developer and/or CMS / Hosting company recommends I could not figure out what to type of CMS you’re useing if you’re using one
make a robots.txt file using
http://tools.seobook.com/robots-txt/generator/
https://www.internetmarketingninjas.com/seo-tools/robots-txt-generator/exportrobots.php
https://moz.com/learn/seo/robotstxt
It will look like this below.
User-Agent: *
Disallow:Sitemap: https://www.nomader.com/sitemap.xml
it looks like you’re using Java for your website?
https://builtwith.com/detailed/nomader.com
I am guessing you’re not using a subdomain to host the Landing Pages?
If you are using a subdomain you would have to create a robots.txt file for that but from everything I can see you’re using your regular domain. So you would simply create these files ( i’m in a car on a cell phone so I did quick to see check if you have a XML site map file but I do think you do
https://www.nomader.com/sitemap.xml
You can purchase a tool called Screaming Frog SEO spider if your site is over 500 pages you will need to pay for it it’s approximately $200 however you will be able to create a wonderful site map you can also create a XML site map by googling xml sitemap generators. However I would recommend Screaming Prod because you can separate the images and it’s a very good tool to have.
Because you will need to generate a new site map whenever you update your site or add Landing Pages it will be done using screaming frog and uploaded to the same place in the server. Unless you can create a dynamic sitemap using whatever website of the infrastructure structure using.
Here are the directions to add your site Google Search Console / Google Webmaster Tools
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/34592?hl=en
If you need any help with any of this please do not hesitate to ask I am more than happy to help you can also generate a site map in the old version of Google Webmaster Tools / Google Search Console.
Hope this helps,
Tom
-
Thanks for the reply Thomas. Where do you see that my site has the robots.txt file? As far as I can tell, it is missing. Instapage does not offer robots.txt as I mentioned in my post. Here's a community help page of theirs where this question was asked and answered: https://help.instapage.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/213622968-Sitemap-and-Robotx-txt
So in the absence of having a robots.txt file, I guess the only way to counter this is to manually request a fetch/index from Google console? How often do you recommend I do this?
-
You don’t need to worry about instapage & robot.txt your site has the robots.txt & instapage is not set to no index.
so yes use google search console to fetch / index the pages it’s very easy if you read the help information I posted below
https://help.instapage.com/hc/en-us#
hope that helps,
Tom
-
If you cannot turn off “Meta Noindex“ you cannot fix it with robots.txt I suggest you contact the developer of the Instapage landing pages app. If it’s locked to no index as you said that is the only of for countering a pre coded by the company Meta Noindex issue?
I will look into this for you I bet that you can change it but not via robots.txt. I
will update it in the morning for you.
All the best,
Tom
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Does anyone know the linking of hashtags on Wix sites does it negatively or postively impact SEO. It is coming up as an error in site crawls 'Pages with 404 errors' Anyone got any experience please?
Does anyone know the linking of hashtags on Wix sites does it negatively or positively impact SEO. It is coming up as an error in site crawls 'Pages with 404 errors' Anyone got any experience please? For example at the bottom of this blog post https://www.poppyandperle.com/post/face-painting-a-global-language the hashtags are linked, but they don't go to a page, they go to search results of all other blogs using that hashtag. Seems a bit of a strange approach to me.
Technical SEO | | Mediaholix0 -
Disallow wildcard match in Robots.txt
This is in my robots.txt file, does anyone know what this is supposed to accomplish, it doesn't appear to be blocking URLs with question marks Disallow: /?crawler=1
Technical SEO | | AmandaBridge
Disallow: /?mobile=1 Thank you0 -
Multiple robots.txt files on server
Hi! I have previously hired a developer to put up my site and noticed afterwards that he did not know much about SEO. This lead me to starting to learn myself and applying some changes step by step. One of the things I am currently doing is inserting sitemap reference in robots.txt file (which was not there before). But just now when I wanted to upload the file via FTP to my server I found multiple ones - in different sizes - and I dont know what to do with them? Can I remove them? I have downloaded and opened them and they seem to be 2 textfiles and 2 dupplicates. Names: robots.txt (original dupplicate)
Technical SEO | | mjukhud
robots.txt-Original (original)
robots.txt-NEW (other content)
robots.txt-Working (other content dupplicate) Would really appreciate help and expertise suggestions. Thanks!0 -
Why Can't Googlebot Fetch Its Own Map on Our Site?
I created a custom map using google maps creator and I embedded it on our site. However, when I ran the fetch and render through Search Console, it said it was blocked by our robots.txt file. I read in the Search Console Help section that: 'For resources blocked by robots.txt files that you don't own, reach out to the resource site owners and ask them to unblock those resources to Googlebot." I did not setup our robtos.txt file. However, I can't imagine it would be setup to block google from crawling a map. i will look into that, but before I go messing with it (since I'm not familiar with it) does google automatically block their maps from their own googlebot? Has anyone encountered this before? Here is what the robot.txt file says in Search Console: User-agent: * Allow: /maps/api/js? Allow: /maps/api/js/DirectionsService.Route Allow: /maps/api/js/DistanceMatrixService.GetDistanceMatrix Allow: /maps/api/js/ElevationService.GetElevationForLine Allow: /maps/api/js/GeocodeService.Search Allow: /maps/api/js/KmlOverlayService.GetFeature Allow: /maps/api/js/KmlOverlayService.GetOverlays Allow: /maps/api/js/LayersService.GetFeature Disallow: / Any assistance would be greatly appreciated. Thanks, Ruben
Technical SEO | | KempRugeLawGroup1 -
How to find temporary redirects of existing site you don't control?
I am getting ready to move a clients site from another company. They have like 35 tempory redirects according to MOZ. Question is, how can I find out then current redirects so I can update everything for the new site? Do I need access to the current htaccess file to do this?
Technical SEO | | scott3150 -
Are image pages considered 'thin' content pages?
I am currently doing a site audit. The total number of pages on the website are around 400... 187 of them are image pages and coming up as 'zero' word count in Screaming Frog report. I needed to know if they will be considered 'thin' content by search engines? Should I include them as an issue? An answer would be most appreciated.
Technical SEO | | MTalhaImtiaz0 -
The word 'shop' in a page title
I'm reworking most of the page titles on our site and I'm considering the use of the word 'Shop' before a product category. ex. Shop 'keyword' | Brand Name As opposed to just using the keyword sans 'Shop.' Some of the keywords are very generic, especially for a top level category page. Question: Is the word 'Shop' damaging my SEO efforts in any way?
Technical SEO | | rhoadesjohn0 -
No indexing url including query string with Robots txt
Dear all, how can I block url/pages with query strings like page.html?dir=asc&order=name with robots txt? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | HMK-NL0